In another battle at Kabeira, Lucullus’s men were winning. This time it was Mithradates in gleaming armor who leaped on his white horse, galloped out alone, and rallied his men. The king—remarkably fit and courageous for a man over sixty—led a formidable cavalry charge, sending the terrified Roman army crashing though the trees up the mountainside.
Mithradates sent messengers throughout the land proudly announcing this impressive victory over the Romans. His spies reported that Lucullus, low on supplies, had sent out ten cohorts (about five thousand men) to Cappadocia to get grain. Here was a chance for Mithradates to stomp on the Roman belly, as Lucullus had done to him at Cyzicus.32
Mithradates dispatched Menander to intercept Lucullus’s convoys returning from Cappadocia. Constant battle stress and inconclusive outcomes were beginning to fray nerves, interfering with judgment. Menander’s advance cavalry caught the Roman supply train, marching single file down a steep trail into Pontus. But Menander was too impatient to wait until they reached the open plain. His cavalry horses slipped on the rocky trail, and the Roman foot soldiers were able to force the men and horses over the cliff. A few cavalry reached Mithradates’ camp before the others. They exaggerated the calamity into a disaster of great magnitude, claiming they were the sole survivors. As Appian remarked, the losses were large but not overwhelming, yet the rumors whipped up fear in Mithradates’ camp.
Mithradates remained steady. He sent out another large force to cut off another of Lucullus’s returning convoys led by Adrian. But Mithradates’ forces really were annihilated his time. According to Plutarch, only two survivors returned to Kabeira. Mithradates tried to hide the extent of this true catastrophe. Plutarch says he blamed “this slight setback” on the inexperience of his generals. But when Adrian “marched back pompously past Mithradates’ camp,” showing off hundreds of wagons groaning with grain and the armor and weapons of Mithradates’ dead cavalrymen, everyone in Kabeira—already tense—learned the terrible truth.
Finally, after this string of disasters, including the loss of his navy, Mithradates’ optimism deserted him. A “great despair fell upon the king,” reported Plutarch, and his soldiers were seized by “confusion and helpless fear.” As soon as Lucullus received the news of Adrian’s victory, he would attack Kabeira. That night, Mithradates called his close companions—Dorylaus, the Magus Hermaeus, eunuch-advisers Bacchides and Ptolemaeus, and his generals—to his tent. All agreed that flight was the only option. The plan was to meet at Comana, the rich, fortified town of the Temple of Love, and then seek refuge in Armenia with Tigranes. Before dawn, each man hastily packed his own baggage on horses outside the gates, and helped to load a mule train with bag upon bag of gold, royal regalia, and treasure.33
I imagine that Mithradates followed the practical advice of his old friend King Parisades of the Bosporus: “Always wear your finest costume to address your soldiers. But when it is necessary to flee, put on commoners’ clothing to conceal your identity from the enemy as well as your subjects.”34 Changing from royal garb into nondescript apparel for the flight, Mithradates concealed his daggers and essential drugs under his clothes. He had one final task before daylight. As Appian tells us, in “utter despair for his kingdom,” Mithradates assigned the eunuch Bacchides to carry out a terrible mission. The eunuch was to ride to the castle at Pharnacia. There he was to put to death the royal harem before the Romans could find them.
Mithradates planned to give the general order for retreat at daybreak. But his frightened soldiers heard the commotion in the night and jumped to the conclusion that their high command was abandoning them. Panic raced through the camp. Fear mingled with rage scattered soldiers helterskelter in the dark. In the chaos, the men attacked their own baggage trains. Mithradates dashed out of his tent and ran among his soldiers, shouting and pleading for calm in every dialect he knew. His second in command, Dorylaus, throwing on his purple robe, rushed out to join the king in the tumult. They tried to reassure the crowd that they were not abandoning them, that all would depart together at daylight.
But no one could hear the king’s words in the mad crush. He and Dorylaus were separated. Hermaeus, the royal seer, was one of those trampled to death by the mob at the gates. And Mithradates? The king was swept up—alone and on foot—in the torrent, borne along by the crowd surging out onto the dark road to Comana.
Without his diadem and finery, Mithradates was an anonymous figure in the fleeing throng. Far behind, at the gates of Kabeira, desperate soldiers were still pillaging the baggage train of the king’s friends. Some seized fine horses, while others murdered for an officer’s fancy dagger, another man’s glittering rings, or someone’s money belt of gold. It was in this frenzy that Dorylaus—Mithradates’ steadfast companion since their childhood and years in exile—met his end. Dorylaus was stabbed to death by one of his own men for the possession of his purple cloak.35
When Lucullus received the news of Mithradates’ flight, he sent his cavalry to pursue the fugitives. Strict orders: the king was to be captured alive, along with his private papers. Lucullus himself led his infantry to take Kabeira. As they surrounded the city, still a scene of confusion and hysteria, Lucullus ordered the legionnaires to refrain from killing anyone and to hold off looting, until they could impose order. But the men, extremely resentful at having been starved of loot for two years and contemptuous of their leader’s restraint, refused to listen. Dazzled by the eye-popping riches of Kabeira—silver vessels, jewelry and gems, royal ornaments, and exquisite purple and gilt-embroidered garments—the Romans snatched up whatever spoils they could carry. They set about killing indiscriminately. Lucullus stood by powerless to stop them.
At last, while his exhausted legionnaires slept cradling their treasures, Lucullus investigated the desolate palace, castles, and towers of Kabeira. He found even more treasure stored in vaults. He also found dungeons; breaking the locks, he discovered many relatives of Mithradates, long given up for dead. Plutarch described their release as “more of a resurrection than a rescue.” Among these wretched souls was Nyssa, Mithradates’ younger sister. For nearly forty years, since she was a little girl, Nyssa had been hidden away so that she could never marry. Nyssa joined Mithradates’ captive general Alexander, to be paraded later in Lucullus’s Triumph. No records explain exactly how Stratonice and her son Xiphares escaped—but somehow they reached the secret stronghold of Kainon Chorion, undetected by Lucullus.
FIG. 12.4. Lucullus’s soldiers sacked Mithradates’ fortress and residence at Kabeira. Artist unknown.
While Lucullus took possession of Kabeira, Bacchides arrived in Pharnacia to carry out his grim duty. He was the perfect choice. Strabo described this eunuch as a ruthless paranoid, always suspecting treachery. Bacchides enlisted the help of the other eunuchs to execute Mithradates’ family in the most expedient ways at hand, to prevent their capture by a mob of Roman soldiers.
Detailed descriptions of that harrowing night were related by Plutarch, who had access to the accounts of witnesses who were later captured or deserted to the Romans. The scene in all its poignant horror has inspired artists, composers, poets, and playwrights to imagine the tragedy. Among the women at Pharnacia were young Berenice and her mother, rescued from their enslaved island of Chios, only to die now on the stormy shores of the Black Sea. Monime, the intelligent Greek beauty who had resisted Mithradates’ gold, holding out for the diadem and title of queen, was also in Pharnacia. Plutarch wrote, “Bacchides ordered them all to die, in what ever manner each woman deemed easiest and most painless.” The eunuch’s inner thoughts are unknowable, as he stood there with his dagger in one hand and a chalice of poison in the other. But the last words of some of the women were recorded for posterity.36
FIG. 12.5. Mithradates’ queen Monime tried to hang herself with her diadem, a tragic scene popular in early modern Europe. Drawing, Claude Vignon the Elder (1593–1670), Louvre, Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.
FIG. 12.6. Mithradates’ sisters Statir
a and Roxana take poison. Illustration for Racine’s play Mithridate, engraving by P. J. Simon.
Monime bewailed her unhappy marriage. Tearing off the purple ribbon that decorated her hair, she twisted it in her hands, sobbing. “I traded my freedom and beauty for captivity, surrounded by barbarian eunuchs!” Mithradates, she claimed, had once promised to take her to Greece, where she had hoped to find happiness. “All the blessings I yearned for are nothing but dreams!” Monime knotted the diadem around her neck and hanged herself from the rafters. But the ribbon snapped. Clutching the frayed ends in her fist, she screamed, “You cursed bauble! You have never been any use to me, not even for hanging!” She spit on the diadem, hurling it away. Monime bared her throat to Bacchides’ knife.
Berenice took the cup of poison. As she lifted it to her lips, her mother cried out, begging to share the same cup. Together they drank the poison, the daughter making certain that her mother drank more. The dose killed the older woman immediately, but Berenice was young and strong. “As Berenice was long in dying, and Bacchides was in a hurry,” writes Plutarch, the eunuch strangled her.
Mithradates’ two unmarried sisters, Roxana and Statira, in their forties, were next. Both chose poison. Like Monime, Roxana was embittered, heaping curses upon her brother. But Statira drank calmly from her cup, without uttering a single reproach. Instead, Statira asked Bacchides to convey her thanks to her brother. For even when his own life was in danger, she declared, he had not neglected his sisters and concubines. She praised Mithradates for ensuring that they would not suffer at the hands of the Romans but would die in eleutheria, freedom.37
13
Renegade Kings
WHEN we last saw Mithradates, he was swept away by a desperate mob, fleeing Kabeira. The ancient sources tell us what happened next, but we can only imagine the king’s emotions. No doubt his mind was replaying an anguished panorama of his disasters on land and sea. Anxiety for his companions and kingdom mingled with images of the deaths he himself had ordered for his family, queen, lovers, children. But there can be no doubt that Mithradates also forced himself to think ahead, to calculate options for survival. If only he had a horse. . . . Suddenly he hears a familiar voice shouting his name, addressing him as king. Across the sea of fugitives he spies Ptolemaeus, one of his eunuch-advisers, with other friends on horseback, leading mules loaded with the royal treasure. The eunuch offers his mount to the king. After hurried words, Mithradates and his companions spur their horses toward Comana. The Roman cavalry is in hot pursuit.
An advance party of Lucullus’s Galatians catches up with them. It looks like curtains for Rome’s elusive foe. But Mithradates whips out his dagger and leans down to slash open the bags on the back of the nearest mule. A cascade of golden coins pours out. While the squabbling Galatians gather up the trail of gold in the road, Mithradates escapes.
These greedy soldiers cheated Lucullus out of capturing his prize quarry, the great adversary whom the Romans had chased for nearly twenty years of hardship and danger. The story of how Mithradates finessed his narrow escape by dazzling his pursuers with gold was retold often in Rome. The incident seemed to confirm the sense that Lucullus’s campaign was more about robbing Mithradates’ riches than crushing the mortal enemy of Rome. In the Senate, Cicero compared the king’s ploy of scattering gold to the famous escape of the witch Medea, who scattered the severed limbs of her victims to distract her pursuers.
Yet another group of soldiers disobeyed Lucullus’s orders to bring Mithradates’ personal secretary back alive. Callistratus was carrying Mithradates’ private papers, a highly desirable prize. Roman soldiers did capture Callistratus—but then killed him in a melee over his money belt stuffed with five hundred gold coins. The king’s bloodstained private papers were carelessly flung away, never to be recovered (was the secret formula for the Mithridatium among them?).1
Meanwhile, the fugitives from Kabeira reached Comana, the Temple of Love where Mithradates had tarried with Dorylaus and his friends so long ago. They were joined by about two thousand cavalry. Mithradates’ little party included key players: General Taxiles and other officers, field medic Timotheus, and the Agari shamans. Taking on supplies, the fugitives rode to Talaura, where Mithradates had stashed heirlooms and gold. Then they made their way over mountain passes toward Armenia.2
With the Pontic navy no longer supreme in the Black Sea and his army destroyed amid mounting defections, Mithradates had to expect his son Machares to make a deal with the Romans. His only hope for personal survival lay with Tigranes, who would surely shelter his father-in-law. But could Mithradates somehow also convince Tigranes—now the most formidable bulwark against Roman rule in the East—to help him regain his kingdom?
Lucullus and his army arrived four days later at Talaura. Too late! The Roman commander absorbed the dismal news. His prey had escaped yet again. Mithradates and two thousand horsemen had already slipped over the frontier into Armenia, ruled by the all-powerful Tigranes and his barbarian hordes.
PLENTY OF PLUNDER, NO PREY
In 70 BC, Lucullus completely lost track of his quarry. When he learned that Mithradates had also deprived him of capturing the royal family alive, Lucullus expressed sorrow for the loss of innocent lives. Historians portray Lucullus as humane, but he also regretted the loss of trophies to show off in Rome. Now, capturing or killing Mithradates was the missing capstone of his mission. Lucullus dispatched a stolid young officer named Appius to demand that King Tigranes turn over the fugitive war criminal.
Lucullus continued taking over Pontic strongholds and besieging cities faithful to Mithradates. The historian Strabo’s grandfather was a local Pontic leader, overseeing fifteen forts. But because Mithradates had executed some kinfolk for treason, Strabo’s grandfather decided to surrender the forts to Lucullus. That was a mistake, Strabo reported: not only did the Romans renege on the promised rewards, but after Lucullus returned to Rome, his successor Pompey actually arrested Strabo’s grandfather and other relatives as enemy combatants.
Thanks to Callimachus’s countersiege machines, Amisus fought off the Romans for a long time. In the end, Callimachus set fire to the city before escaping by sea. As the flames enveloped the walls, Lucullus desperately begged his troops to save the beautiful city before looting it. But the soldiers shouted him down, clashing their shields and banging their spears, baying for booty. They rushed in to pillage and slaughter all night, setting more fires with torches. Just before dawn, a cold rain doused the fires. But the destruction was total. At daybreak Lucullus viewed the ruins and burst into tears. Callimachus had deprived him of an opportunity to make a grand gesture of mercy. Luculus devoted himself to rebuilding Amisus. Alexander the Great had restored the town’s democracy when he liberated it from Persia, and Mithradates was not the only leader in this era who strove to emulate Alexander. Lucullus, a philhellene, deliberately invoked Alexander’s gesture, claiming he had “liberated” the destroyed city from Mithradates.3
In Sinope, Mithradates had left a eunuch and a pirate in command. They were an unlikely pair: Bacchides had saved the royal consorts from fates worse than death, and Seleucus of Cilicia had rescued Mithradates in the storm. They vigorously resisted the Romans (although at one point Seleucus considered killing the citizens and handing the city over to Lucullus for a reward). When it became obvious that Sinope would fall, Bacchides and Seleucus burned all their warships, crammed treasure into a few pirate biremes, and sailed to Colchis.
Lucullus was able to save Sinope from total destruction by his loot-crazed men, but they killed more than eight thousand Sinopeans. Lucullus personally plundered Mithradates’ most valuable possessions, including his great library, masterpieces of art, and scientific instruments. Two outstanding trophies were singled out by Strabo. One was the statue of the city’s founder, Autolycus the Argonaut (the Sinopeans had tried to protect it by swathing it in linen, but the Romans found the bundle abandoned on the seashore). The other prize was an object taken from Mithradates’ palace,
the “Globe of Billarus.” This astronomical “globe” or “sphere” (terms used for mechanized planetariums) was not described by Strabo, but there is reason to believe that it was an invention of renown. Mithradates had a keen interest in technology and collected precious things.4
Italian historian Attilio Mastrocinque proposes an intriguing theory. Could the Globe of Billarus be the mysterious Antikythera device, the oldest complex scientific instrument ever discovered? This intricate, gear-driven bronze mechanism—the world’s first computer—was recovered in 1901 by sponge divers from a Roman shipwreck near Antikythera, an island north of Crete. The three-hundred-ton ship sank between 70 and 60 BC on the way to Italy, crammed with plunder from the Third Mithradatic War. The divers also brought up superb marble and bronze statues, jewelry, datable coins, and an ornate bronze throne—all treasures looted from defeated Anatolian cities allied with Mithradates, perhaps including Sinope. The strange bronze instrument apparently belonged to Mithradates or someone in his circle.
In 2008, advanced technology deciphered the Antikythera device’s complex workings and revealed inscriptions. The device’s sophistication is astounding: it calculated the precise movements of celestial bodies (a particular concern for the Magi and Mithradates). The newfound inscription suggests that the device was created in 150–100 BC, in (or by a scientist associated with) Syracuse or Alexandria, places linked to the famous scientist Archimedes. A similar but older “celestial globe,” invented by Archimedes himself, was looted from Syracuse by the Romans in 212 BC.
FIG. 13.1. Antikythera mechanism, Athens National Museum. Replica, American Computer Museum, Bozeman, Montana, photo by Michelle Maskiell.
Scholars who study the Antikythera device are puzzled: how did this amazing instrument in the Archimedian tradition come to be among Mithradatic treasures seized by Romans? They assume that the device must have belonged to a pro-Roman Greek living in Rhodes. But Mastrocinque’s idea that the Antikythera device could be the lost Globe of Billarus, taken by Lucullus from Sinope, is persuasive. As we know, Mithradates befriended leading scientists and had an interest in technology. Mastrocinque argues convincingly that the Billarus sphere was an astronomical instrument, and he notes that it was never mentioned again after Strabo. It would be quite a coincidence if two rare and important “celestial globes” were lost in this same time period. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the Billarus sphere from Sinope was on the Roman treasure ship lost at sea near Antikythera. If Mastrocinque is right, Mithradates’ passion for technology, Lucullus’s cultivated eye for fabulous plunder, and a sponge diver’s lucky find combined to give us a unique glimpse into a high point of ancient science.5
The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy Page 34
